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The next president could go further and tell allies such as Germany, Japan and Canada that their status as major trading partners protected by the U.S. security umbrella is now contingent upon their making steep emissions cuts.

In the Paris negotiations, developing nations were explicitly open to making more ambitious commitments if developed countries contributed to making them happen.

Rich countries industrialized with fossil fuels, developing industries powered by coal, delivering fossil-fuel-based electricity and heat to homes, and building transportation systems that run on the internal-combustion engine. In following this path, these countries chewed through most of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas that could be spewed until global temperatures warmed by 2 degrees Celsius

The United States has contributed about 26 percent of the world’s cumulative emissions, and the 28 nations of the European Union are responsible for only slightly less.

if Americans had been restricted to emitting a proportional share of a global carbon budget that capped warming at 1.5 degrees, we would have blown through that limit in 1944.

Climate finance means foreign aid for three main purposes

mitigation: subsidies for renewable-energy deployment and storage, electrical-grid modernization, and other means of reducing emissions

adaptation, which means preparing societies and their infrastructure for the effects of climate change, such as building flood walls to hold back higher sea levels or retrofitting buildings to withstand more severe heat waves.

coverage for loss or damage: compensation for people whose homes become uninhabitable or whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate change.

“climate justice,” which also includes providing support to marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change in rich countries.

Last year, at a climate summit in Poland, India reiterated its openness to doing more if it were adequately subsidized, and an organization of the 47 least-developed nations echoed that plea.

Nobody knows how big the ultimate U.S. number will need to be; it depends on how many rich countries pitch in, and how much they give, and how much help poorer countries need to modernize in eco-friendly way

to stay below 2 degrees of warming, by 2030 the global economy needs to give a “green” makeover to the $5 trillion per year spent worldwide on sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, construction and heavy industry.

his may be toxic for American voters. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change, are increasingly worried about it and in theory support the notion that the government should address it — but they are more divided in their willingness to actually pay for climate action

only 23 percent said they’d pay at least $40 per month to fight climate change

The United States may have a narrow opportunity to pay down some of its historical debts, stem the tide of future climate refugees and manage the political instability that extreme warming would cause. The last chance came in 2009-2010, but the Senate failed, in part thanks to Obama’s bungling of the negotiations, to pass even domestic climate legislation

The leaders of developing nations aren’t suckers, and they know how dire the problem is. They have something rich countries want (emissions reductions), and they’d be fools to just give it away for free, even if they could. If we want them to succeed, it’s going to cost us, and we’ll need to move quickly. The science is clear: We do not have another decade to waste.

Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.

For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason

That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.

The vote-stealing theory got its first exposure beyond the web the day before the election on Mr. Bannon’s show. Because of the Hammer, Mr. McInerney said, “it’s going to look good for President Trump, but they’re going to change it.” The Democrats, he alleged, were seeking to use the system to install Mr. Biden and bring the country to “a totalitarian state.”

with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”

Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.

As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.

Yet as the draft circulated among Republican attorneys general, several of their senior staff lawyers raised red flags. How could one state ask the Supreme Court to nullify another’s election results? Didn’t the Republican attorneys general consider themselves devoted federalists, champions of the way the Constitution delegates many powers — including crafting election laws — to each state, not the federal government?

In an interview, Mr. Kobach explained his group’s reasoning: The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).

The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.

One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”

The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.

By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.

But talk at the rally was tilting toward what to do if they didn’t.“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”

Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.

Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.

But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.

The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.

Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.

Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”

“What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”

The Justice Department has been directed to draft rules regulating stabilizing braces that make AR-15 pistols, which are generally subject to fewer regulations than rifles, more stable and accurate.

The Justice Department will draft a template for states to use to write "red flag" laws that enable law enforcement and family members to seek court orders to remove firearms from people determined to be a threat to themselves or others.

"He called out, forthright, that violence is a public health crisis and that it disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities," she said. "He named that violence is the leading cause of death for Black boys and men, and the second leading cause of death for Latino boys and men. That matters.

As a member of the Senate, Biden was in the forefront of passing measures regulating guns, including a ban on sales of assault-style weapons and the Brady law, which instituted a nationwide system of background checks. But as president, Biden has been relatively cautious, calling on the Senate to pass House-approved measures expanding background checks and giving the FBI more time to process them, but he has been prioritizing other actions, such as a COVID-19 relief bill and his infrastructure and jobs plan.

Biden has been under pressure to act to curb gun violence after last month's shootings in Boulder and at several Atlanta-area businesses that killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent.

"This is not the end of what this administration will do, but we thought it was very important for the president to come out early, within the first 100 days of his administration, to make clear ... that this remains a very significant priority for the administration."

Biden reiterated his call for the Senate to act on the House bills on Thursday, but it's not clear the measures have a simple majority there, much less the 60 votes they would need to overcome a Republican filibuster. Biden said members of Congress have "offered plenty of thoughts and prayers" but have failed to pass any legislation. "Enough prayers," Biden said. "Time for some action."

"If done in a manner that respects the rights of law-abiding citizens, I believe there is an opportunity to strengthen our background check system so that we are better able to keep guns away from those who have no legal right to them," Toomey said.

Biden said none of his actions "impinges on the Second Amendment," but gun rights advocates are likely to challenge the new restrictions in court.

"We will not be open to doing nothing," the president said. "Inaction, simply, is not an option." Translation: Get on board or step aside.

In remarks Wednesday pushing for his sweeping $2.3 trillion plan, Biden said he wants to meet with Republicans about it and hopes to negotiate in "good faith" — a political tenet that hasn't been practiced much in Washington, D.C., in recent years.

With the narrowest of majorities, one defection kneecaps the ability of Democrats to pass anything — even through partisan procedures such as budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority and was used for the COVID-19 relief bill.

But Biden's overall approach to legislating so far — on a big, bold agenda — is winning plaudits from political strategists, left and right. "I am more impressed with Joe Biden than I ever thought I could be in the last few months,"

Several strategists said Biden has been more organized and disciplined out of the gate than former Democratic Presidents Obama or Bill Clinton, and they said his team's steadiness — so far — resembles someone Biden has almost nothing in common with from a policy standpoint: George W. Bush.

the Biden team's policy rollouts have been about as smooth, methodical and drama-free as you could expect, particularly given the polarized nature of our politics,"

"is effectively taking advantage of D.C.'s Trump hangover by just engaging in straightforward communications tactics."

It seems like Biden has taken a page from the Bush playbook, essentially cauterizing the chaos that defined Trump's policy announcements and replacing it with a fact-driven, drama-free approach that's working."

Biden clearly wants to do big things. On Wednesday, he made a case for a grand vision when it came to infrastructure. He drew on the past but looked to the future, and he swatted down GOP concerns about the size of the plan and criticism that he should focus on "traditional infrastructure" like roads, highways and bridges.

"We are America," the president said. "We don't just fix for today, we build for tomorrow.

Biden has been acutely aware of attempting to establish his place in history, even though he's been in office fewer than 100 days. Last month, in fact, the 78-year-old met with historians at the White House. Biden wants to be a bridge to the transformation of the country — and this infrastructure proposal is clearly a big part of that.

"He sees this as an opportunity to deliver massive change, the literal infrastructure of the country,"

"It's the return of traditional politics in a way that neither Trump nor Obama were willing to do," Simmons said, noting that "the Obama people did really good things. I think that they did not sell them very well."

"It's a Kennedy and Johnson-type dynamic,"

"Lyndon Johnson was phenomenal at working Congress, because that's what he did. President Obama was phenomenal at inspiring the public, as did Kennedy."

And while Biden would prefer bipartisanship, Cardona notes that Biden "learned the lessons of the Obama era" — not to wait around for Republican support that never materialized.

"He's not giving up on bipartisanship," she noted, "but he is living in a cold and cruel reality. ... These are things Biden has learned the hard way and taken to heart."

"We're at an inflection point in American democracy," Biden said Wednesday. "This is a moment where we prove whether or not democracy can deliver." And whether or not he can, too.

“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,”

On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.

In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.

In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.

In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.

After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work.

The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.

The panel said Facebook and other Meta platforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”

“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.

The panel said it was focused on Reddit because the platform hosted the r/The_Donald subreddit community that grew significantly before migrating in 2020 to the website TheDonald.win, which ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the Jan. 6 attack.

“Unfortunately, the select committee believes Twitter has failed to disclose critical information,” the panel stated.

In recent years, Big Tech and Washington have had a history of butting heads. Some Republicans have accused sites including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether a number of tech companies have grown too big, and in the process abused their market power to stifle competition. And a bipartisan group of senators and representatives continues to say sites like Facebook and YouTube are not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Meta said that it had “produced documents to the committee on a schedule committee staff requested — and we will continue to do so.”

The panel has interviewed more than 340 witnesses and issued dozens of subpoenas, including for bank and phone records.

“In a properly functioning education system, that’s giving them really robust messaging about what it means to be a man, they would have antibodies to fight off the sick messaging that Tate is giving. All they see is the guy who’s got a Bugatti and joking about telling women to make him a sandwich.

“When teachers try to explain why Tate isn’t someone to look up to, the teenage boys ask them, ‘Well, what colour is your Bugatti?’

“The premise needs to be attacked directly, which is that ‘no, money isn’t the main index of masculinity’. Otherwise, we would all just be looking up to gangsters and criminals.”

Knowland, who teaches English and has forged a career as an online tutor, was sacked in 2020 after refusing to take down a video he made for his students called The Patriarchy Paradox, which repeated claims that women would revert to a primitive life without men.

Knowland believes the issues he was seeking to address in the lecture, which is still on his YouTube channel and has had 255,000 views, have only increased since his sacking.

The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) decided to take no action against Knowland after an inquiry. Eton College has previously said that the ruling did not undermine its decision to dismiss him.

The school reported the lecture to the TRA, which considered charges of undermining tolerance and failing to safeguard students but closed the case with no further action. In a statement, the school said: “This does not mean that Mr Knowland did nothing wrong or that Eton was not entitled to dismiss him.”

He added: “I think the most interesting part about the lecture and what resonated with my supporters was my stress on chivalry and the idea that a man’s strength should be put to the service of the weak and his family.

“Chivalry is the thing that we’re missing today and it’s become deformed and turned into machismo, which is masculinity without any sense of humility or meekness. I think this is what we need to return to. Some of the problems that Tate is addressing, things like men should be assertive, men should be competitive, men should be strong, etcetera, chivalry agrees with.

“But chivalry says, ‘Why do they need to be those things? Because it’s to serve the weak, not themselves.”

Knowland, 37, believes that Tate — who rose to infamy last year after videos of his diatribes led to him becoming the world’s most googled person — has tapped into a “malaise” among young men caused by the teaching of boys in schools.

As an example, last month Scotland had to pause movement of transgender prisoners after a row over whether a transgender female rapist should be imprisoned with biological women.

“For some, even saying that there are biological differences between men and women is offensive. That’s what my lecture said, that men are stronger,” Knowland added. “I don’t think that [women] should [compete in sport against transgender women]. I don’t think it’s safe.

The example I gave in the lecture [was] of the transgender fighter who fractured the woman’s skull, and could easily have killed her. I think there are good reasons why sporting bodies are moving towards and in some cases have already decided that there’s not going to be next events like that.”

During the Eton furore Simon Henderson, the head master of Eton, was criticised in some quarters for pursuing a “woke” culture at the school and his critics referred to him as “Trendy Hendy”. They pointed to pupils being asked to wear Black Lives Matter waistcoats and decolonising its curriculum as examples of the institution being captured by ideologues.

The content Knowland produces on his YouTube channel continues to be controversial. A recent video by the devout Catholic is entitled “Eight facts that killed evolution for me”.

“The lecture was addressing some very live issues at the time and it’s only got worse since then,” he said. “Women now feel that they haven’t got safe spaces to get undressed to go to a swimming pool. So those concepts in the lecture were hard hitting and provocative, because these are topics that are big ones that people have strong feelings about.”

While Knowland does not agree with the term transgender — “there are only two categories of sex, using the term transgender concedes too much ground” — he is alive to the issue of transphobic bullying. The issue has been in the spotlight this month after Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl, was stabbed to death in a park.

“People being subjected to transphobia is terrible,” he said. “People shouldn’t mistreat anybody just because they’ve got a mistaken idea that they are a woman. They need to be treated with compassion, not attacked or bullied.”

Knowland’s newfound career as an online tutor, as well as hosting a podcast, has eased some of the pressure he felt after his sacking. He said: “At Eton our family home was a benefit, so that was on my mind when I was leaving. I had to wait a couple of years after leaving to get a home because being self-employed, you have to get all the paperwork to get a mortgage.

“I’ve actually had parents get in touch because they supported me over what happened at Eton and wanted me to tutor their children.

“Losing my job was concerning but it gave me an insight into what it feels for someone to be cancelled. Fear is such a powerful weapon to stop people believing what they’re passionate about.

“People feel they can’t say anything, because consequences are going to be too severe, but now I’ve been through it I’ve actually found it freeing.”

The modern GE was built by Jack Welch, the youngest CEO and chairman in company history when he took over in 1981. He ran it for 20 years, becoming the rare CEO who was also a household name, praised for his strategic and operational mastery.

their most obvious problem. GE couldn’t live without GE Capital, still so big it was essentially the nation’s seventh largest bank. But investors couldn’t live with GE Capital and its unshakable shadow of risk, either.

it worked more like a collection of businesses under the protection of a giant bank. As the financial sector came to drive more of the U.S. economy, GE Capital, the company’s finance arm, powered more of the company’s growth. At its height, Capital accounted for more than half of GE’s profits. It rivaled the biggest banks in the country, competed with Wall Street for the brightest M.B.A.s and employed hundreds of bankers.

The industrial spine of the company gave GE a AAA credit rating that allowed it to borrow money inexpensively, giving it an advantage over banks, which relied on deposits. The cash flowed up to headquarters where it powered the development of new jet engines and dividends for shareholders.

Capital also gave General Electric’s chief executives a handy, deep bucket of financial spackle with which to smooth over the cracks in quarterly earnings reports and keep Wall Street happy

GE shares were trading at 40 times its earnings when Welch retired in 2001, more than double where it had historically. And much of those profits were coming from deep within Capital, not the company’s factories.

When the financial crisis hit, Capital fell back to earth, taking GE’s share price and Immelt with it. The stock closed as low as $6.66 in March 2009. General Electric was on the brink of collapse. The market for short-term loans, the lifeblood of GE Capital, had frozen, and there was little in the way of deposits to fall back on. The Federal Reserve stepped in to save it after an emergency plea from Immelt.

the near-death experience taught investors to think of GE like a bank, a stock always vulnerable to another financial collapse

At its peak, General Electric was the most valuable company in the U.S., worth nearly $600 billion in August 2000. That year, GE’s third of a million employees operated 150 factories in the U.S., and another 176 in 34 other countries. Its pension plan covered 485,000 people.

What if the GE Jack Welch built didn’t work any more?

Cracks in the performance of the company’s industrial lines—its power turbines, jet engines, locomotives and MRI machines—would now be plain to see, some executives worried, without Capital’s cash to help cover the weak quarters and pay the sacrosanct dividend

Most of the shortfall came from its service contracts, which should have been the source of the easiest profits. Instead, the heart of the industrial business was hollow. And its failure was about to tip the entire company into crisis.

Former colleagues compared him to Bill Clinton because of his magnetic ability to hold the focus of a room. He sounded like a leader. He was a natural salesman.

Immelt was so confident in GE’s managerial excellence that he projected a sunny vision for the company’s future that didn’t always match reality. He was aware of the challenges, but he wanted his people to feel like they were playing for a winning team. That often left Immelt, in the words of one GE insider, trying to market himself out of a math problem.

Alstom’s problems hadn’t gone away, but now its stock was cheaper, and Immelt saw the makings of a deal that fit perfectly with his vision for reshaping his company. GE would essentially swap Capital, the cash engine that no longer made sense, for a new one that could churn out profits each quarter in the reliable way that industrial companies were supposed to.

To the dismay of some involved, GE’s bid crept upward, from the €30 a share that the power division’s deal team already believed was too high, to roughly €34, or almost $47. Immelt and Kron met one-on-one, and the deal team realized the game was over. The principals had shaken hands.

The visions for the present and the future were both fundamentally flawed. As GE’s research department was preparing white papers heralding “The Age of Gas,” the world was entering a multiyear decline in the demand for new gas power plants and for the electricity that made them profitable.

When advisers determined that the concessions to get the deal approved might have grown costly enough to trigger a provision allowing GE to back out, some in the Power business quietly celebrated, confiding in one another that they assumed management would abandon the deal. But Immelt and his circle of closest advisers wanted it done. That included Steve Bolze, the man who ran it and hoped someday to run all of General Electric.

“Steve’s our guy,” McElhinney said in one meeting. If Bolze was elevated to CEO, those behind him in Power would rise too. “Get on board,” he said. “We have to make the numbers.”

Immelt, trapped in Welch’s long shadow, craved a bold move to shock his company out of the doldrums that had plagued his tenure. It was time for GE to be reinvented again.

In the dry language of accounting in which he was so fluent, Flannery was declaring a pillar of Immelt’s pivot had failed: GE had been sending money out the door to repurchase its stock and pay dividends but wasn’t bringing in enough from its regular operations to cover them. It wasn’t sustainable. Buybacks and dividends are generally paid out of leftover funds.

when GE spun off Genworth, there was a chunk of the business, long-term-care insurance, that lingered. Policies designed to cover expenses like nursing homes and assisted living had proved to be a disaster for insurers who had drastically underestimated the costs

The bankers didn’t think the long-term-care business could be part of the Genworth spinoff. To make the deal more attractive, GE agreed to cover any losses. This insurance for insurers covered about 300,000 policies by early 2018, about 4% of all such policies written in the country. Incoming premiums weren’t covering payouts.

Two months after Miller flagged the $3 billion, it was clear the problem was a great deal larger. GE was preparing for it to be more than $6 billion and needed to come up with $15 billion in reserves regulators required it to have to cover possible costs in the future. The figure was gigantic. By comparison, even after the recent cut, GE’s annual dividend cost $4 billion.

JP Morgan analyst Steve Tusa, who led the pack in arguing that GE was harboring serious problems, removed his sell rating on the stock this week. GE’s biggest skeptic still thinks the businesses are broken but the risks are now known. The stock climbed back above $7 on Thursday, but is down more than 50% for the year and nearly 90% from its 2000 zenith.

Kohr’s guiding principle was anarchism, “the noblest of philosophies.” But its inherent nobility, he recognized, also made it utopian:

Kohr cleverly turned this utopianism upside down, from weakness to strength: any party, any leader, any ideology promising utopia is automatically wrong, or lying [7]. Acceptance of utopia’s unattainability, in other words, is the best insurance against totalitarianism.

The strength of the American federation, Kohr thought, rested in no small part on the genius of its division: into states of roughly equal size. How different American history could have coursed, if the Union had looked like this:

in Kohr’s vision, smaller government should mean, first and foremost, a smaller area to govern.

: “The absolute maximum to which a society can expand without having its basic functions degrade, is about 12 to 15 million people.”

One of his 10 basic laws is the so-called Beanstalk Principle: For every animal, object, institution or system, there is an optimal limit beyond which it ought not to grow. In other words: “too big to fail” is a contradiction in terms. The real solution is to make countries (and companies) too small to fai

Kohr supported the independence movements of Puerto Rico, Wales and Anguilla [8], and opposed grand unification projects like the European Union. He appealed for the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, long before they happened

In 1992, Freddy Heineken — yes, he of beer-brewing fame — devised Eurotopia, a Europe divided into 75 regions, based on Kohr’s ideas. And much earlier, revolutionary France produced a proposal for geometrically identical départements [12] prefiguring Kohr’s Europe map.

Some other Kohr principles: the Law of Peripheral Neglect (governmental concern, like marital fidelity or gravitational pull, diminishes with the square of distance); the Population Principle (as the size of a population doubles, its complexity quadruples); and the Self-Reliance Principle (self-reliant communities are less likely to get involved in war than those who depend on global trade systems).

both men believe that Obama's pursuit of a deal is not Chamberlain-like, but instead a regional necessity—so long as Iran is kept at least a year away from nuclear breakout.

All options for me are still on the table,” including the military option. But when asked if a nuclear Iran posed an "existential threat," he demurred: "It is a big threat. That’s enough.

Goldberg: Come to this large question of the Labor Party. Why is the Labor Party in such a diminished state? Where did it go wrong?

For a long time, we were members in coalitions of other leaders. We kind of were erased of our identity. It took us time to recover, and we also lost touch with new groups in society while taking the role and demanding to be part of it. For example, the Russian immigration of a million people

Add to it other groups. The Arab population—they gave 96 or 98 percent support to Ehud Barak.

Couple it with the fact that there's a young generation who took over, who's coming in, who's voting, and they don't remember the legacy of Labor. And add to that the fact that even within that young generation, or the general public at large, we were viewed as giving up too quickly to the Palestinians or the Arabs.

The fact that there is no connection, no discussion, no discourse or no trust between the leaders, is adverse to the ability to reach an agreement. Yesterday morning I had breakfast with Gerry Adams, the leader of the [Irish Republican Army's political wing] Sinn Fein. May I remind you he was an outcast? He came to Israel and Palestine. I know him. And we had breakfast. And I said to him, “Gerry, could you tell me, what was the moment of truth, that all of a sudden you guys moved?” And he said, “When we all came to realize that we won't achieve it in any other way—both sides.”

Goldberg: Israel is quite obviously a Jewish state. What's so bad about passing a law that says, Israel is a Jewish state? Herzog: I will explain the following and I said it in the floor in the parliament when I debated with Netanyahu last week. I said that when it comes to the deal with the Palestinians, in the final-status moments, I think it's correct to say that both states are nation-states, that Palestine will be the nation-state of the Palestinian people and Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people, as it is derived from the November [19]47 UN Partition Plan of Resolution. But this has nothing to do with what's within Israel. Within Israel, all citizens must feel they are equal, not only to say it, but they must feel it. And coming forward with this discourse, on Jewish state, treads on racist undertones, makes a feeling that somebody will be preferred on the other. The way a majority treats a minority is essential to the well-being of our society. The Arab community in Israel is 20 percent. It's comprised of all denominations of Christianity and Islam. Fascinating community—like all other communities in Israel, non-homogeneous at all. Many of them want to be part of an inclusiveness in the Israeli public life all throughout, and there are many who want to be secessionists. Our duty is to be inclusive, if you want to protect the well-being of the state. And to make anybody feel, in any form or manner, that he is not that, is not only a huge mistake; it's against the basic inherent declaration of independence of the state of Israel, which is our Magna Carta.

It depends on building trust. It depends on confidence-building measures. It depends on being innovative, bold, and it depends on radiating to the people that there is hope. The situation that we see right now is so devastating because there's a feeling of lack of hope. There's a despair feeling and most worrisome of all is the unleashing of feelings of religious hatred that is so dangerous to all of us, turning it into religious war.

I speak a lot to Abu Mazen, and I said to Abu Mazen, “People say that even if I negotiate with you, you'll never make peace with us.” And he laughed, and he said, “I'm sure we can reach an agreement.”

I believe in freezing settlement construction outside the blocs as part of confidence-building measures. But it should be part of a plan that Israel presents. And this plan should of course take into account, most importantly, the basic inherent security needs of the state of Israel.

I do believe however, unequivocally and from the bottom of my heart, that since it's a must, it's a must under all circumstances, to separate from the Palestinians, that if it fails, we will have to take steps that define our borders in a clearer way.

There are ways, even if you don't negotiate, you can coordinate. Even if you can freeze settlement construction as I mentioned. You can do steps that say, I gave priority to that area and not the other. But I think it's a mistake that we already assume that it's over. It's part of the tragedy that unfolds in front of our eyes. It is not true, I'm telling you absolutely. It is possible, absolutely possible still, to make peace with the Palestinians.

Goldberg: Well, I've heard people on the right in Israel talk about replacing Europe, for instance, with a China-India policy. You don't think that Israel can pivot east? Herzog: There's nothing to compare, with all due respect to these important countries, economically they are very important countries. But we look at the record, look at the record in the United Nations. Look at the record in the UN Security Council. We have only really one trustworthy ally, which we really share affection and trust with on so many levels, and there's nothing to replace that.

Goldberg: The Palestinian Authority is a fairly weak and corrupt body. Obviously Palestine itself is divided between two competing and sometimes warring parties. Why do you—you seem to have more faith in the Palestinian Authority than the average Israeli. Herzog: Because they lead a moderate Palestinian political body. Let's be frank about it. We always love to judge everybody else's political systems. I'm not judgmental. If I have to take a decision between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, I believe in working with the Palestinian Authority, and I believe it's feasible.

And they are working. Look at the summer. Let's put it in perspective. Following the abduction of the three boys, which was a huge tragedy for Israelis and for everybody, the Palestinian Authority functioned properly. They coordinated with us [in our] efforts to find their whereabouts. They handled the situation in calming it down, despite the fact that there were many Israeli operations on the ground. Then came Protective Edge in the summer in Gaza, so before kind of always, everybody loves to term them as weak. So far, Abu Mazen survived four or five Israeli prime ministers to the best of my recollection

Goldberg: You are prime minister—what is your settlement policy? Herzog: My settlement policy first and foremost is based on the famous [Clinton] parameters. I believe in the blocs. I definitely believe in Gush Etzion [a major settlement bloc just outside Jerusalem] being part of Israel. It's essential for its security.

—what makes you think that now, which most people see as a very inauspicious time for a revised peace process—what makes you think that now is the time to try to move towards this two-state solution?

Herzog: It's not that now is the time. It has been a long drawn-out process. Don't forget Oslo. You're ignoring a lot of things. You're ignoring the Khartoum process of ‘68 and compare it to today. It's a totally different ball game, totally different arena. Today there is an intense interfacing and discourse between us and the Palestinians, not necessarily through the leaders.

my fear is, that within the Palestinian and Israeli camp, the peoples are losing faith in the possibility of separating and coming to the two-state solution. It was there, believe me, it was there. In 1994, during the Rabin era, there was a huge majority for it in both peoples. Unfortunately, terror on both sides led to the fact that we got into a stumbling block with no possibility of moving forward, and then we repeated it time and again.

Goldberg: Where does that come from?  Where does that impulse to suddenly slaughter a group of rabbis with a meat cleaver come from? Herzog: There's no justification of it, none whatsoever. It's against any moral, legal, or human values, period. And it's shocking. Nonetheless, when you look at the whole picture, we have to analyze it, and in order to neutralize these elements, we have to bring hope. And we cannot give up on that.

Rather than provide housing for the homeless, cities offer showers, day care centers and bag checks.

We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets.

“There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,” Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, said after a 2018 visit to Northern California.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve done outreach on every continent,” Dame Louise Casey, who directed homeless policy for several British prime ministers, said after touring homeless encampments in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities.

almost 40 percent of workers in households making less than $40,000 a year have lost work. Women in Need NYC, which runs shelters, warned this week that New York faces a “mass increase” in homelessness

Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right

the first law of real estate applies to homelessness, too: Location, location, location. The nation’s homeless population is concentrated in New York, the cities of coastal California and a few other islands of prosperity.

Well-educated, well-paid professionals have flocked to those places, driving up housing prices. And crucially, those cities and their suburbs have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing to keep up.

The government calculates $600 is the most a family living at the poverty line can afford to pay in monthly rent while still having enough money for food, health care and other needs. From 1990 to 2017, the number of housing units available below that price shrank by four million.

While there are roughly 80,000 homeless people in New York on any given night, more than 800,000 New Yorkers — more than 10 times as many people — are scraping by, spending more than half their income on rent.

According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness.

In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.

in recent decades, wealth and homelessness have both increased — a stark illustration of the inequalities that pervade American life.

Having failed to address homelessness during the longest economic expansion in American history, the nation now faces a greater challenge under more difficult circumstances

Reframing the debate — asking what is necessary to end homelessness — is an important first step for New York and for other places that are failing this basic test of civic responsibility.

The program costs about $19 billion a year. Vouchers for all eligible households would cost another $41 billion a year

Where to get the money? Well, the government annually provides more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.

Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.

Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction,

Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared.

In California, for example, construction of a five-story apartment building that meets minimum standards costs an average of $425,000 per unit,

Without public aid, the apartments would need to be rented for several times more than the $600 a month affordable to a family living at the poverty line.

Proposals for a big increase in affordable housing construction inevitably call to mind the troubled public housing projects of the mid-20th century. They offer one clear lesson: Avoid housing that concentrates poverty

there is a solution — to build subsidized housing as part of mixed-income developments and to spread the developments out, putting them not just in cities but also in the surrounding suburbs.

Helsinki, Finland, a city of just 600,000 people, builds about 7,000 units of mixed-income housing a year. That’s a big reason Finland is the rare European country where homelessness is in decline.

Extending this approach to the entire homeless population would be expensive. To take one example, King County, which encompasses Seattle, would need to increase annual spending on homelessness to roughly $410 million from $196 million to help each of the county’s 22,000 homeless families, according to a study by McKinsey. That’s about $19,000 per family.

Even if the cost per person were twice as high, the nation’s homeless population could be housed for $10 billion a year — less than the price of one aircraft carrier.

there is worse to come. Homelessness rises during recessions, the federal funding is temporary and state and local governments face huge drops in tax revenue.

The federal government already provides housing vouchers to help some lower-income families. The families pay 30 percent of their monthly income toward rent; the government pays the rest. But instead of giving vouchers to every needy family, the government imposes an arbitrary cap. Three in four eligible families don’t get vouchers.

Americans must decide whether we are willing to let elementary school students spend nights in guarded parking lots

We must decide whether it’s worth spending just a little of this nation’s vast wealth to ensure that no 60-year-old woman needs to sleep on the same bench in downtown Santa Monica

The Justice Department is also preparing to resolve accusations of foreign currency misconduct at UBS. As part of that deal, prosecutors are taking the rare step of tearing up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with the bank over the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, the people said, citing the bank’s foreign currency misconduct as a violation of the earlier agreement.

The guilty pleas, scarlet letters affixed to banks of this size and significance, represent another prosecutorial milestone in a broader effort to crack down on financial misdeeds. Yet as much as prosecutors want to punish banks for misdeeds, they are also mindful that too harsh a penalty could imperil banks that are at the heart of the global economy, a balancing act that could produce pleas that are more symbolic than sweeping.

While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.

In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions — or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing — the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.

The action against UBS underscores the threats that Justice Department officials issued in recent months about voiding past deals in the event of new misdeeds, a central tactic in a plan to address the cycle of corporate recidivism. Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, recently remarked that she “will not hesitate to tear up a D.P.A. or N.P.A. and file criminal charges where such action is appropriate.”

The Justice Department negotiations coincide with the banks’ separate efforts to persuade the S.E.C. to issue waivers from automatic bans that occur when a company pleads guilty. If the waivers are not granted, a decision that the Justice Department does not control, the banks could face significant consequences.

For example, some banks may be seeking waivers to a ban on overseeing mutual funds, one of the people said. They are also requesting waivers to ensure they do not lose their special status as “well-known seasoned issuers,” which allows them to fast-track securities offerings. For some of the banks, there is also a concern that they will lose their “safe harbor” status for making forward-looking statements in securities documents.

it seemed probable that a majority of the S.E.C.’s commissioners would approve most of the waivers, which can be granted for a cause like the public good. Still, the agency’s two Democratic commissioners — Kara M. Stein and Luis A. Aguilar, who have denounced the S.E.C.’s use of waivers — might be more likely to balk.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and other liberal politicians have criticized prosecutors for treating Wall Street with kid gloves. Banks and their lawyers, however, complain about huge penalties and guilty pleas.

lingering in the background is the case of Arthur Andersen, an accounting giant that imploded after being convicted in 2002 of criminal charges related to its work for Enron. After the firm’s collapse, and the later reversal of its conviction, prosecutors began to shift from indictments and guilty pleas to deferred-prosecution agreements. And in 2008, the Justice Department updated guidelines for prosecuting corporations, which have long included a requirement that prosecutors weigh collateral consequences like harm to shareholders and innocent employees.

“The collateral consequences consideration is designed to address the risk that a particular criminal charge might inflict disproportionate harm to shareholders, pension holders and employees who are not even alleged to be culpable or to have profited potentially from wrongdoing,” said Mark Filip, the Justice Department official who wrote the 2008 memo. “Arthur Andersen was ultimately never convicted of anything, but the mere act of indicting it destroyed one of the cornerstones of the Midwest’s economy.”

After years of deferred-prosecution agreements, the pendulum swung back in favor of guilty pleas in 2012

In pursuing cases last year against Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas, prosecutors confronted the popular belief that banks had grown so important to the economy that they could not be charged

Yet after prosecutors announced the deals, the banks’ chief executives promptly assured investors that the effect would be minimal.“Apart from the impact of the fine, BNP Paribas will once again post solid results this quarter,” BNP’s chief, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, said.Brady Dougan, Credit Suisse’s chief at the time, said the deal would not cause “any material impact on our operational or business capabilities.”

Europeans failed to build Europe, and that is now a big problem because, as its common currency comes under pressure and the E.U. goes deeper into recession, the whole world feels the effects

In Europe, the supranational project did not work, and now, to a degree, Europe is falling back into individual states.

In the Arab world, the national project did not work, so some of the Arab states are falling back onto sects, tribes, regions and clans.

Now, based on the U.S. response since February, Lipsitch believes that we’re still likely to see the virus spread to the point of becoming endemic.

That would mean it is with us indefinitely, and the current pandemic would end when we reach levels of “herd immunity,” traditionally defined as the threshold at which enough people in a group have immune protection so the virus can no longer cause huge spikes in disease.

Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that, because of a “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling,” the U.S. is “unlikely” to achieve herd immunity even after a vaccine is available.

The case-fatality rate for COVID-19 is now very roughly 1 percent overall. In the absolute simplest, linear model, if 70 percent of the world were to get infected, that would mean more than 54 million deaths.

Without a better plan, this threshold—the percentage of people who have been infected that would constitute herd immunity—seems to have become central to our fates.

Some mathematicians believe that it’s much lower than initially imagined. At least, it could be, if we choose the right future.

Gomes explains, “There doesn’t need to be a lot of variation in a population for epidemics to slow down quite drastically.”

in dynamic systems, the outcomes are more like those in chess: The next play is influenced by the previous one. Differences in outcome can grow exponentially, reinforcing one another until the situation becomes, through a series of individually predictable moves, radically different from other possible scenarios. You have some chance of being able to predict the first move in a game of chess, but good luck predicting the last.

“selective depletion” of people who are more susceptible—can quickly decelerate a virus’s spread. When Gomes uses this sort of pattern to model the coronavirus’s spread, the compounding effects of heterogeneity seem to show that the onslaught of cases and deaths seen in initial spikes around the world are unlikely to happen a second time.

Based on data from several countries in Europe, she said, her results show a herd-immunity threshold much lower than that of other models.“We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” Gomes said. “It’s very striking.”

If that proves correct, it would be life-altering news. It wouldn’t mean that the virus is gone. But by Gomes’s estimates, if roughly one out of every five people in a given population is immune to the virus, that seems to be enough to slow its spread to a level where each infectious person is infecting an average of less than one other person

That’s the classic definition of herd immunity. It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.

he believes that the best we can do is continually update models based on what is happening in the real world. She can’t say why the threshold in her models is consistently at or below 20 percent, but it is. “If heterogeneity isn’t the cause,” she said, “then I’d like for someone to explain what is.”

Lipsitch also believes that heterogeneity is important to factor into any model. It was one reason he updated his prediction, not long after we spoke in February, of what the herd-immunity threshold would be. Instead of 40 to 70 percent, he lowered it to 20 to 60 percent. When we spoke last week, he said he still stands by that, but he is skeptical that the number lands close to the 20 percent end of the range. “I think it’s unlikely,” he said, but added, “This virus is proving there can be orders-of-magnitude differences in attack rates, depending on political and societal decisions, which I don’t know how to forecast.”

Biological variations in susceptibility could come down to factors as simple as who has more nose hair, or who talks the loudest and most explosively, and Langwig shares the belief that these factors can create heterogeneity in susceptibility and transmission. Those effects can compound to dramatically change the math behind predictions for the future.

What’s important to her, rather, is that people are not misled by the idea of herd immunity. In the context of vaccination, herd-immunity thresholds are relatively fixed and predictable. In the context of an ongoing pandemic, thinking of this threshold as some static concept can be dangerously misleading.

She worries that many people conflate academic projections about reaching herd immunity with a “let it run wild” fatalism. “My view is that trying to take that route would lead to mass death and devastation,” she says.

Left totally unchecked, Bansal says, the percentage of infected people could go even higher than 70 percent.

“Within certain populations that lack heterogeneity, like within a nursing home or school, you may even see the herd-immunity threshold be above 70 percent,” Bansal says. If a population average led people in those settings to get complacent, there could be needless death.

Bansal believes that heterogeneity of behavior is the key determinant of our futures. “That magic number that we’re describing as a herd-immunity threshold very much depends on how individuals behave,” Bansal says, since R0 clearly changes with behaviors. On average, the R0 of the coronavirus currently seems to be between 2 and 3, according to Lipsitch.

Social distancing and other reactive measures changed the R0 value, and they will continue to do so. The virus has certain immutable properties, but there is nothing immutable about how many infections it causes in the real world.

The threshold can change based on how a virus spreads. The spread keeps on changing based on how we react to it at every stage, and the effects compound. Small preventive measures have big downstream effects

In other words, the herd in question determines its immunity. There is no mystery in how to drop the R0 to below 1 and reach an effective herd immunity: masks, social distancing, hand-washing, and everything everyone is tired of hearing about. It is already being done.

“I think it no longer seems impossible that Switzerland or Germany could remain near where they are in terms of cases, meaning not very much larger outbreaks, until there’s a vaccine,” he said. They seem to have the will and systems in place to keep their economies closed enough to maintain their current equilibrium.

Other wealthy countries could hypothetically create societies that are effectively immune to further surges, where the effective herd-immunity threshold is low.

We have the wealth in this country to care for people, and to set the herd-immunity threshold where we choose. Parts of the world are illuminating a third way forward, something in between total lockdown and simply resuming the old ways of life. It happens through individual choices and collective actions, reimagining new ways of living, and having the state support and leadership to make those ways possible

as much attention as we give to the virus, and to drugs and our immune systems, the variable in the system is us. There will only be as much chaos as we allow.

But to cause an extinction event on the scale of those seen millions of years ago, in which more than 75 percent of species disappeared, we would have to lose all our threatened species within a century and then keep losing species at that same super-high rate for between 240 and 540 more years. In other words, the concept assumes that we won’t save anything, ever, and that hundreds of years into the future, we will still be as inept at protecting biodiversity as we are now.

That’s just not true. As of today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the conservation status of 128,918 species has been assessed. Of those, 902 have gone extinct since the year 1500. This is absolutely too many. One is too many.

this study actually looked at the average decline of a given population (not species) of wild animal. So severe declines in small populations disproportionately increase the average decline.

You might have also heard that we’ve lost something like 60 percent of wild animals since the 1970s? Surely this suggests that a lot more extinctions are imminent?

More recently, a new analysis of the data showed that, indeed, the 60 percent average decline was driven by very severe crashes in a very small number of vertebrate populations. For example, one small population of Australian waterfall frogs declined 99.5 percent over two years. This decline became one data point, which was averaged with 14,000 others, many from stable or increasing populations.

Really, less than 3 percent of vertebrate populations are crashing

This means that declines are not the rule everywhere. It means that the specific populations in crisis can be identified and helped. And we have the knowledge to save them, if we can marshal the will and resources.

This targeted approach works for environmental policy too. The Trump administration pushed for more than 100 rollbacks of pollution standards, land protections, and other green policies,

Jill Tauber, the vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice, told me that her organization has more than 100 lawsuits pending against the Trump administration and that so far, once cases pass any procedural hurdles, her side is winning more than 80 percent of them

The U.S. could spend about what it already spends on energy—a mere 4 to 6 percent of gross domestic product—and still reach this goal, according to a new report out of Princeton University.

as the cost of key technologies such as solar panels and batteries has fallen, the price tag to move the country to net-zero emissions by 2050—as President Joe Biden has pledged—has also dropped

The necessary changes would have to start immediately, and they aren’t minor. Visualize a huge build-out of solar, wind, and transmission lines, for starters

What they need to be able to say clearly to politicians is: ‘I value this; this is an important priority to me.’

To make it happen, though, American citizens must “create a demand for the policy,”

On Wednesday, Biden signed an executive order on climate, which sets a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the country by 2030, launches a Civilian Climate Corps, and hits pause on fossil-fuel development on public lands

“If we don’t keep up that demand for policy, then it is just not going to happen,”

Jenkins also rejects the idea that if we fail to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the key target in an influential United Nations report, all is lost. “Any time you see a round number like 2.0 or 1.5 or 20 percent by 2020, that is a political number,” he said. “The reality is that every 10th of a degree matters.” There is no threshold after which it is not worth fighting.

climate change and extinction have been ongoing problems for as long as many of us can remember, feeling that they’re impossible to engage with right now is only natural.

But many of our problems are so thoroughly tangled up with one another that we may not need to fight them separately.

So fighting for racial or economic justice, or against voter suppression, still can mean fighting for the environment.

Not everything can be saved. But 2021 can be better than 2020, and 2031 can be much, much better than 2021, if we demand it.

U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms

scientists sounding the alarm about high extinction rates, and in the years that followed, the idea that we are in the midst of one of the planet’s greatest mass-extinction events

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One very good reason to feel overwhelmed is that everything seems screwed up at once.  As a country, we’re facing climate change, the pandemic, racial injustice, the threat of dangerous fascist elements

Environmental destruction disproportionately harms people of color and lower-income people. And people of color are, on average, significantly more concerned about climate change than white people. A leading cause of inaction on climate change is the hoarding of power by some of the world’s wealthiest people, who profit from planetary destruction that they don’t have to deal with personally. They can simply crank up the air conditioner, pay more for the last remaining champagne and oysters, or fly to their New Zealand bunker, so they have no incentive to change unsustainable systems that they benefit from. When political power is more fairly distributed, the environment will benefit.

One explanation for why so many come to that conclusion in the first place has to do with the widening of the gulf between America’s coasts and the region in between them

Cities that can entice well-educated professionals are booming, even as “flyover” communities have largely seen good-paying factory work automated or shipped overseas, replaced to a large extent with insecure jobs: Walmart greeters, independent-contractor truck drivers, and the like.

a college degree has become the true mark of individual success in America—the sort of white-picket-fence fantasy that drives people well into their elder years to head back to school

the white working class that emerged in the 19th century—stitched together from long-combative European ethnic groups—strived to set themselves apart from African Americans, Chinese, and other vilified “indispensable enemies,” and build, by contrast (at least in their view), a sense of workingman pride.

this last election was a reminder that white male resentment of “nasty” women and “uppity” racial and other minorities remains strong.

That said, many Americans with more stable, better-paid jobs have blind spots of their own. For all of their professed open-mindedness in other areas, millions of the well-educated and well-off who live in or near big cities tend to endorse the notion, explicitly or implicitly, that education determines a person’s value

white voters from hard-hit rural areas and hollowed-out industrial towns have turned away from a Democratic Party that has offered them little in the way of hope and inspiration and much in the way of disdain and blame.

Well into the 21st century, two-thirds of Americans age 25 and over do not have a bachelor’s degree. The labor market has become more polarized, as highly paid jobs for workers with middling levels of education and skill dwindle away.

As much as both liberals and conservatives have touted education as a means of attaining social mobility, economic trends suggest that this strategy has limits, especially in its ability to do anything about the country’s rapidly growing inequalities

such a fervent belief in the transformative power of education also implies that a lack of it amounts to personal failure—being a “stupid” person

even some workers I spoke to—all former union members—said they felt that people without a good education did not deserve to make a good living.

The rules of meritocracy that these blue-collar workers say they admire barely apply to the very top levels of the economy. Groups of elite workers—professionals, managers, financial workers, tenured professors—continue to wall themselves off from competition. They still organize collectively, through lobbying, credentialing, licensing, and other strategies. But fewer ordinary workers have the same ability to do so

What has emerged in the new economy, then, is a stunted meritocracy: meritocracy for you, but not for me

From gripes about the backwardness and boredom of small-town America to jokes about “rednecks” and “white trash” that are still acceptable to say in polite company, it’s no wonder that the white working class believes that others look down on them. That’s not to say their situation is worse than that of the black and Latino working classes—it’s to say that where exactly they fit in the hierarchy of oppression is a question that leads nowhere, given how much all these groups have struggled in recent decades.

However exaggerated by stereotypes, the urbane, urban values of the well-educated professional class, with its postmodern cultural relativism and its rejection of old dogmas, are not attractive alternatives to what the working class has long relied on as a source of solace.

In the absence of other sources of meaning, Americans are left with meritocracy, a game of status and success, along with the often ruthless competition it engenders. And the consequence of a perspective of self-reliance—Americans, compared to people in other countries, hold a particularly strong belief that people succeed through their own hard work—is a sense that those who fail are somehow inferior

The concept of grace comes from the Christian teaching that everyone, not just the deserving, is saved by God’s grace. Grace in the broader sense that I (an agnostic) am using, however, can be both secular and religious. In the simplest terms, it is about refusing to divide the world into camps of deserving and undeserving, as those on both the right and left are wont to do

It rejects an obsession with excusing nothing, with measuring and judging the worth of people based on everything from a spotty résumé to an offensive comment.

Unlike an egalitarian viewpoint focused on measuring and leveling inequalities, grace rejects categories of right and wrong, just and unjust, and offers neither retribution nor restitution, but forgiveness.

With a perspective of grace, it becomes clearer that America, the wealthiest of nations, possesses enough prosperity to provide adequately for all. It becomes easier to part with one’s hard-won treasure in order to pull others up, even if those being helped seem “undeserving”—a label that today serves as a justification for opposing the sharing of wealth on the grounds that it is a greedy plea from the resentful, idle, and envious.

ignorance shouldn’t be considered an irremediable sin. Yet many of the liberal, affluent, and college-educated too often reduce the beliefs of a significant segment of the population to a mash of evil and delusion

One of the few things he could really depend on was his church. He volunteered on their Sunday-school bus, leading the kids in singing songs. “It helps to be around young people,” he said. For many of the jobless workers I interviewed, religion and tradition provided a sense of community and a feeling that their lives had purpose.

While there are no simple explanations for the desperation and anger visible in many predominantly white working-class communities, perhaps the most astute and original diagnosis came from the rabbi and activist Michael Lerner, who, in assessing Donald Trump’s victory, looked from a broader vantage point than most. Underneath the populist ire, he wrote, was a suffering “rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.”

That cuts right to it. The modern economy privileges the well-educated and highly-skilled, while giving them an excuse to denigrate the people at the bottom (both white and nonwhite) as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated.

many well-off Americans from across the political spectrum scorn the white working class in particular for holding onto religious superstitions and politically incorrect views, and pity them for working lousy jobs at dollar stores and fast-food restaurants that the better-off rarely set foot in

This system of categorizing Americans—the logical extension of life in what can be called an extreme meritocracy—can be pernicious: The culture holds up those who succeed as examples, however anecdotal, that everyone can make it in America. Meanwhile, those who fail attract disdain and indifference from the better-off, their low status all the more painful because it is regarded as deserved.

the shame of low status afflicts not just the unemployed, but also the underemployed. Their days are no longer filled with the dignified, if exhausting, work of making real things.

For less educated workers (of all races) who have struggled for months or years to get another job, failure is a source of deep shame and a reason for self-blame. Without the right markers of merit—a diploma, marketable skills, a good job—they are “scrubs” who don’t deserve romantic partners, “takers” living parasitically off the government, “losers” who won’t amount to anything

Even those who consider themselves lucky to have jobs can feel a sense of despair, seeing how poorly they stand relative to others, or how much their communities have unraveled, or how dim their children’s future seems to be: Research shows that people judge how well they’re doing through constant comparisons, and by these personal metrics they are hurting, whatever the national unemployment rate may be.

It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave he was. Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann’s from Hawaii, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I re­member her saying that.” Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar — that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.

Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teach­ers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Java­nese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily,” he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikrana­gara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikrana­gara, said, “People tease about skin color all the time.” If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”

“She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indone­sia,” he wrote in his memoir. “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often character­ized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.”

Ann uprooted Barry, at age 6, and transplanted him to Jakarta. Now she was up­rooting him again, at barely 10, and sending him back, alone. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later. When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. “I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Of­fice and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid.”

he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of un­conditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface dis­turbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

All of the examples chosen that represent racial slights or overt racism only raise the specter of how these frat members are raised, what they truly believe, and how organizations that permit such behavior and encourage the newbies to go along with it perpetuate racism in all its forms. As such, the question "what should we do about fraternities" isn't any different from the same question with the terms "KKK", "Neo-Nazis", or "anti semetics" substituted in for "fraternities".

The fraternities are a reflection of college life and life in America.There is more polarization on campuses, with students not mixing, exchanging ideas and engaging one another. Instead, they are congregating with other students just like them, and this is occurring across the race and color spectrum. Several college professors blame the Greek system for seeming to foster this division, but I believe it is more of a reflection of what is going on in America, as society is similarly divided and not engaging with anyone who is not alike.Is it risk aversion, need for affirmation, security? Unknown, but while I'm not a fan of the Greek system/life, I do not believe it is the crux of the problem.

I will take advantage of the vacuum to explain why my fraternity brought out the worst in its members. The fundamental problem is that most college-age men lack the judgment and life-experience to live together in a self-governing group. Inevitably, the most aggressive, extroverted risk takers will come to dominate the organization. Their best teenage thinking is what gives birth to the worst ideas and greatest excesses of the insular frat life. What else contributes to fraternities' bad reputations? The college administrations, which long ago renounced their in-loco-parentis responsibilities. There was a time when fraternities had seasoned adult house fathers who could keep the guys in line. No more.

"Powerful alumni." That's all that really needs to be said. As we've reduced public funding for higher education, universities are more and more dependent on the deep pockets of alumni who are going to place a phone call to any campus administrator who tries to seriously address all the "fun." Drinking, sexual assault, racism. Fraternities are good at breeding loyalty, loyalty to their chapters, loyalty to their campuses. Few universities can afford to toy with that. Note this Atlantic Monthly article, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fr...

As a student, it seemed to me that the purpose of fraternities was to reaffirm that education didn't really matter -- a big poke in the eye at anyone who believed that they could advance by excelling academically. What really mattered was how much you could drink and debase yourself in tribute to the bastions of current privilege and wealth

for the quality of life in the house, it certainly was not apparent to me. When I came to them with proof positive that a "brother" had stolen a check payable to me, forged my signature and cashed it, they did nothing to sanction him.The dominant group in my fraternity had no apparent thirst for knowledge, just an unquenchable thirst for daily alcohol-fueled parties that lasted into the wee hours with loud music and drugs. We outsiders subsidized their party life and all we got in return was the privilege of living in their zoo.

Why do some Greek-letter organizations seem to bring out the worst in people? Historically white fraternal groups can be key mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of white wealth, power and status. The stakes for belonging are high, and the culture must legitimate its own existence, forcing out those who fail to conform.

Really, though, it's white men who are the ones rebelling against an economy that they feel like devalues their work, against a culture that they fear is devaluing their once-preeminent place in it, and against a mundane existence that devalues any kind of meaning.

Productivity growth stalled in the 1970s, and, at least in the United States, what economic growth there was overwhelmingly accrued to the top 1 percent in the 1980s and beyond. Part of this was due to Western workers having to compete with billions of Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian ones after the Berlin Wall came down. An even bigger part was good-paying jobs being automated into obsolescence. And the rest was policy—tax cuts for the rich, deunionization for the rest, and deregulation for Wall Street—which is why inflation-adjusted median incomes stagnated even more in the U.S. than in Europe

Trump supporters aren't any more likely to have come from places that have lost a lot of manufacturing jobs or have a lot of immigrants. The opposite, actually. Nor are they just people who are barely getting by. They tend to be a rung or two above that—decently middle class or more—who nonetheless might feel economically insecure because they haven't gotten a raise in a long time, and see everyone else around them doing even worse.

It's no surprise that these kind of economic grievances can ratchet up racial ones.

as Harvard economist Ben Friedman found in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, "a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy." So a stagnant one can make people meaner, less generous, and more suspicious of people who don't sound, look, or worship like they do.

it's important to point out that a weak economy isn't necessary for this kind of backlash. Any time white people—and really white men—feel like their position in society is being challenged in any way, this has happened. Like it did, for example, even when the economy was booming during the civil rights movement.

The fact is that a lot of white people don't like being around minorities who haven't assimilated, and they don't want to assimilate to a culture where they'll soon be a minority themselves

even white liberals who aren't used to hearing Spanish in public became much more opposed to increased immigration and much less in favor of letting kids who were born here stay here if their parents were undocumented once they were exposed to Spanish-speakers during their morning commutes. Which seems to explain why, as the Wall Street Journal found, the counties that experienced the fastest minority growth between 2000 and today voted so heavily for Trump.

As researchers Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found, all you have to do is remind them that the country is on track to being majority-minority to make them endorse these kind of racially conservative policies.

But it's not just minorities who white men are worried about. It's women too—or one woman in particular.

There's still a socially-accepted hostility to women being in charge, a fear that this would make a man not a man, and a feeling that women shouldn't even try to act like men. Researchers Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescall found that people experienced "moral outrage" when they were told that a hypothetical female politician was ambitious, but nothing when they were told a male was.

For a lot of people, there is no great cause, no great conflict, no great meaning to it all. The big battles have already been won, and now there are just bills to pay and weekends to look forward to.  The problem with this, Fukuyama wrote, is that "if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because the just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause."

it's something that his supporters don't seem to mind. Earlier this the year, 84 percent of them said that "what we need is a leader who will say or do anything to solve America's problems." Constitutional conservatism this is not.

It's not clear what is to be done. It's true that for almost 35 years now the liberal international order has failed to give rich world workers the rising standard of living they expect. Insofar as that was what was motivating Trump's supporters, we could redistribute more to try to make the economy work for everyone. But Europe already does that, and it hasn't stopped the rise of right-wing nationalists there.

But insofar as Trump's voters were really driven by a fear of a future where white men are no longer politically, economically, and culturally dominant, there's nothing we should do. Some things should not be accommodated

It's possible that 2016 will be our own 1914. Not that we'll descend into a paroxysm of suicidal violence, but that a world that was defined by openness might give way to one that's not.

For the last 70 years, liberal democracy has guaranteed people's individual rights, and the U.S. has guaranteed liberal democracy's right to exist. All of that is doubt now.

Whatever its flaws, the liberal international order gave us peace and prosperity on a scale heretofore unknown in human history. And perhaps in our future too.

Why was the vision of revived manufacturing nonsense?

First, he believes that trade deficits are the reason we’ve shifted away from manufacturing. But they aren’t.

If we could eliminate our current trade imbalance, we’d probably have around 20 percent more workers in the manufacturing sector than we actually do. But that would reverse only a small part of manufacturing’s relative decline, from more than a quarter of the work force in 1970 to less than 10 percent now.

even countries that run huge trade surpluses, like Germany, have seen big declines in manufacturing as a share of employment

to put it differently, running America isn’t like running a family business. It has to be done by setting broad policies and sticking to them, not by browbeating a few people whenever you see a bad headline.

What’s happening instead is that as overall spending grows, an increasing share goes to services, not goods. Consumption of manufactured goods keeps rising, but technological progress lets us produce those goods with ever fewer workers; so the economy shifts toward services

That brings us to his second fallacy: No, trade deficits aren’t caused by unfair foreign trade practices.

The truth is that while tariffs and so on can affect trade in particular industries, the overall trade balance mainly reflects exchange rates, which in turn are mainly driven by capital flows: The dollar is strong because foreigners want to buy U.S. assets

his third big policy misunderstanding: He believes that you can run the economy by yelling at people.

More important, our economy is too big to make policy by singling out individual companies and ranting. How big is it? Around 1.7 million U.S. workers are fired or laid off every month

if you want to know what “services” means: Of the four occupations the Department of Labor expects to add the most jobs over the next decade, three are some kind of nursing (food workers are the fourth)

My guess is that he genuinely believed that he could bring manufacturing, coal mining and so on roaring back, that others had failed to do so only because they weren’t tough enough

You might wonder where his confidence came from, given how little he obviously knows about economics. The answer, probably, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: inept people are often confident in their abilities, because they’re too inept to know how badly they’re doing

“China had a particular approach that it wanted to make, and we agreed and respected to give them space to be able to implement that,

But today in my conversation with the Chinese I made it very clear: That has not worked and we cannot continue business as usual.”

Beijing has only agreed to impose bans on weapons shipments to the North and sanctions on specific companies and individuals linked to the nuclear program,

Kerry did not specify the sanctions that he wanted China to agree to, but two officials familiar with the discussions between the United States and its Security Council partners say the United States is drafting a resolution that envisions far more severe sanctions

But the scope of that ban is unclear;

The first would be a ban on North Korean ships in ports around the world